Effective Software Product Management

We create mobile apps

Made with love and care in the UK.
Published in Google Play and the App Store.
Need a mobile app? Contact Us

Your own In-house apps can be published to exact agreed requirements using our proven product management process to produce software that meets the right requirements and meets quality and time to market goals.

Proven product management process

We work with you to establish the ‘shape’ of the organization and the context
The kind of company you are determines the success criteria for the software we help you create whether it be Vertical Market Software, In-House Bespoke systems, or pervasive Business Software
Alliances with vendors, attitude to Open Source are key influences in software choice
Resources available in the value chain of the business?

If you are a consumer software company trying to build a mobile phone infrastructure you fail the shape test. Do mobile phone companies building consumer software fail it too?

Single version of the truth

Invest in the right type of tools for the project work you are undertaking. As real-time as you can!

Don’t use a Text editor to manage a multi team multi part continual project focus on delivery of solutions with evolving requirements

Invest in thinking about KPI measurement starting from the ground rules. Even the simplest measures for project health can be hugely effective in comparing projects and their teams.

Make Traceability pervasive

We uniquely number items from cradle to grave and don’t allow people to change the number. Not Ever. You can change the name or the order or priority

“Oh no that’s not the Printer Driver it’s the Print Spooler, The printer driver is not yet scheduled.” – Developer

“Is it E001 or not? If its not whats its number so we can trace back to the requirement for clarity, or find it’s a new requirement, schedule it and update the project to take account of its requirements” – You

“its part of E001, its going to take 2 more days..” - Developer

Avoid the tidal wave of mediocrity..

Having ticket management systems in place doesn’t guarantee success. Real success comes from continually completing products that people want. Everyones an expert after the fact but we make you examine how you make these decisions and challenge the simple ones. Group based decision making based on industry conference consensus results in mediocrity, lack of definition, and sameness

It's no good doing things right if youre not doing the right things

We make sure you track milestones, across organisational silos and through political boundaries. We use identical KPI's to measure project success.

Recent work

Region restricted eDiscovery platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS)

This client had need of a very particular set of skills. Skills that have been acquired over a very long career. Skills that would otherwise make a solution like this a nightmare. What we did was to help build out an eDiscovery platform in AWS capable of processing huge amounts of electronic information from email and office documents and images and audio. The eDiscovery platform itself is commercial software which relies on a quite complex deployment of Windows Server, SQL Server, Office Online Server, Elastic Search and its own proprietary agent style processing system. Working with the vendor we were able to build it out in our clients AWS environment and provide a solution equivalent in performance to the vendor's own SaaS product offering but restricted to meet very tight geographic restrictions for access to the data. The solution has extremely tight security and yet delivers flexibility for Internet based legal review of collected information for production in legal proceedings. It is designed and documented to comply with the clients ISO-27001 requirements.

Mobile app platform

We provided professional services at CTO level and created a high performance software development team for Piota to build, manage and support an app platform we built using open source tools and frameworks that we love to work with, which supports many tens of thousands of end user mobile devices for hundreds of organisations. Piota mobile apps are completely free to download from the App Store and Google Play. These apps are designed to help schools streamline communication, cut costs, save time and aid pupil learning. Hundreds of schools, colleges and education related organisations use these apps to improve communications, engagement and feedback. Piota healthcare apps, based on the same platform, help healthcare organisations engage with their audience of employees, patients, carers and others. Piota was recently acquired.

App creation using macOS for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)

macOS must be used to build apps for iOS And iPadOS. Build tools for Android require third party package managers and CI/CD tools which often require Java to be able to function and all these dependencies need to be managed carefully to avoid pitfalls due to macOS security constraints. We provide professional services for all aspects of software creation and publication to the App Store and Google Play.

Product Management and Vision

We provided Leadership support and Interim Product Management consulting services at management level for a NASDAQ quoted client to create a new product vision for eDiscovery software in a market in the middle of a transformation and a product innovation process based on Agile, with light touch but effective oversight and governance. To establish the vision we carefully chose and hired people to join the client pm team who fast showed their ability to become a high performance team.

Police mobile apps for engagement

Surrey Police had over 500 neighbourhood officers using our award winning apps after the completion of the rollout across all eleven boroughs in August 2012. Apps were available for download by members of the public from the App Store and from Google Play. Tayside Police rolled out our apps to their community officers force wide. The apps had tens of thousands of downloads. Note that sadly these apps are no longer available.

Android™ apps

App management involves feasibility analysis and written requirements, development, testing, in-life and end of life support. Android apps need strong Visual Design and User Interaction and performance with stability. Apps designed for Google Play need to adhere to publication criteria.

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Apps for iPhone® and iPad®

App management involves app feasibility analysis and written requirements, development, testing, App Store review, in-life and end of life support. Engaging apps require notifications and regular content and feature updates to keep functionality fresh in concert with new devices and operating systems.

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Joomla!®

Joomla! is an open source, mobile ready content management system under continuous development. Every Joomla! website can have mobile friendly content for visitors and administrators. Joomla! is mature, powerful and proven. We love it and our mobile apps are better because of it.

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Open Source

Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared by anyone. We encourage our developers to contribute code they have written for our projects back to open source projects that use software licenses approved by OSI in the belief that better software will be the result.

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