Spekfy - IT Project Management System
Hi, Habr! Today I would like to share the story of Eugene ebartashevich , who represents the project Spekfy .
His goal is to develop an effective tool for managing IT projects, which allows you to bring together all the requirements and tasks, cost and implementation timeline together with the specification. We invite all those interested in it to the cut - the story will go on behalf of Eugene himself.
/ photo by Mark Hunter CC
')
Thoughts on launching such a service appeared during my work as an independent developer. I started my career as a system administrator, then I worked as a tester, and for the last 10 years I have been freelancing. Here is my upwork on my profile .
I did not have any experience in working on my own startups, and in fact I made this service for myself. I was pushed to this by the experience of working with customers from various fields of activity. The tasks were very different: from the development of CRM for publishing projects management and to the implementation of a defect tracker for a construction company.
All these projects (even at the testing stage) imply collecting product requirements and building a case system for testing based on them. At the moment there are many different tools (for example, Atlassian Confluence) that allow you to accomplish this task, but only in isolation from managing the project as a whole.
I encountered this problem when I needed to evaluate the structure of the development order, the cost and the timing of its implementation for one of the clients on upwork. Here I suggested that he should enter the project into my spekfy system so that, first of all, the client himself could decide what he needs.
One of the next customers offered to bring my project to public access. I appreciated my capabilities and refined it to the look of a completed product prototype. The total time I spent on intermittent development was about 2 years.
As I noted above, for quite a long time I was engaged exclusively in custom development. From the client's point of view, interaction with a freelancer implies two main tasks - saving money along with getting a solution that will be executed at a decent quality level.
For the performer there are certain difficulties. It is not always possible to show your level of competence solely through examples of completed work - the coolest cases usually end up under the NDA, but in order to approve the budget and deadlines, you still need to start communicating with the client with something.
It is at this stage that our solution turns on - Spekfy . It can be used to show the client how much the implementation of individual parts of his project will cost (this way he will be able to assess his needs for saving the development budget) and demonstrate a general understanding of the structure of the task (show his level of competence).
An example of such a case is one of my orders for Upwork. It consisted in the development of CRM for a company leading various courses and private lessons.
The classic situation: the customer takes a long time and systematically prepares and collects the requirements, but in the end they turn out to be too superficial to start the work. In this case, there are also high expectations for the timing and cost of implementation.
During the fragmentation of the project on its components, we not only made detailed requirements for each of these parts, but found out that the customer simply forgot about the part of the functionality. These calculations were sent for approval by the client’s colleagues, and further discussion began.
As is usually the case, we began to gradually entangle each other with chains of forgotten letters and questions, missed calls and endless approvals. All this managed to stop a volitional decision on the transition to Spekfy.
A structured approach to the analysis of all the nuances allowed us to track everything that required final approval, jointly abandon unnecessary customer requirements and start the development process.
In the end, we found out that the initial expectations for terms and costs of implementation were underestimated several times, and the customer was able to painlessly abandon part of the functionality due to its transfer to future versions of the project. This move allowed to find a compromise solution.
Now we have moved away from an absolutely “naked” MVP and offer this tool to anyone who works with IT projects and would like to evaluate the estimated labor costs for the implementation of certain tasks. Today, you can create your own projects, tasks, requirements and use cases. Plus we have integration with Zapier.
In the future, we plan to adapt Spekfy to work on the agile / waterfall methodology, to launch integration with bitbucket / jira, slack and MS Project. In addition, we understood the need to enter custom project templates. We are planning to work on all this, improving the overall usability of the service.
PS We invite everyone to take part in testing and share your opinion on Spekfy in the comments, in addition to this, you can ask any question to the developer - ebartashevich .
His goal is to develop an effective tool for managing IT projects, which allows you to bring together all the requirements and tasks, cost and implementation timeline together with the specification. We invite all those interested in it to the cut - the story will go on behalf of Eugene himself.
/ photo by Mark Hunter CC')
How did the idea
Thoughts on launching such a service appeared during my work as an independent developer. I started my career as a system administrator, then I worked as a tester, and for the last 10 years I have been freelancing. Here is my upwork on my profile .
I did not have any experience in working on my own startups, and in fact I made this service for myself. I was pushed to this by the experience of working with customers from various fields of activity. The tasks were very different: from the development of CRM for publishing projects management and to the implementation of a defect tracker for a construction company.
All these projects (even at the testing stage) imply collecting product requirements and building a case system for testing based on them. At the moment there are many different tools (for example, Atlassian Confluence) that allow you to accomplish this task, but only in isolation from managing the project as a whole.
I encountered this problem when I needed to evaluate the structure of the development order, the cost and the timing of its implementation for one of the clients on upwork. Here I suggested that he should enter the project into my spekfy system so that, first of all, the client himself could decide what he needs.
One of the next customers offered to bring my project to public access. I appreciated my capabilities and refined it to the look of a completed product prototype. The total time I spent on intermittent development was about 2 years.
Where is it already used
As I noted above, for quite a long time I was engaged exclusively in custom development. From the client's point of view, interaction with a freelancer implies two main tasks - saving money along with getting a solution that will be executed at a decent quality level.
For the performer there are certain difficulties. It is not always possible to show your level of competence solely through examples of completed work - the coolest cases usually end up under the NDA, but in order to approve the budget and deadlines, you still need to start communicating with the client with something.
It is at this stage that our solution turns on - Spekfy . It can be used to show the client how much the implementation of individual parts of his project will cost (this way he will be able to assess his needs for saving the development budget) and demonstrate a general understanding of the structure of the task (show his level of competence).
An example of such a case is one of my orders for Upwork. It consisted in the development of CRM for a company leading various courses and private lessons.
The classic situation: the customer takes a long time and systematically prepares and collects the requirements, but in the end they turn out to be too superficial to start the work. In this case, there are also high expectations for the timing and cost of implementation.
During the fragmentation of the project on its components, we not only made detailed requirements for each of these parts, but found out that the customer simply forgot about the part of the functionality. These calculations were sent for approval by the client’s colleagues, and further discussion began.
As is usually the case, we began to gradually entangle each other with chains of forgotten letters and questions, missed calls and endless approvals. All this managed to stop a volitional decision on the transition to Spekfy.
A structured approach to the analysis of all the nuances allowed us to track everything that required final approval, jointly abandon unnecessary customer requirements and start the development process.
In the end, we found out that the initial expectations for terms and costs of implementation were underestimated several times, and the customer was able to painlessly abandon part of the functionality due to its transfer to future versions of the project. This move allowed to find a compromise solution.
Future plans
Now we have moved away from an absolutely “naked” MVP and offer this tool to anyone who works with IT projects and would like to evaluate the estimated labor costs for the implementation of certain tasks. Today, you can create your own projects, tasks, requirements and use cases. Plus we have integration with Zapier.
In the future, we plan to adapt Spekfy to work on the agile / waterfall methodology, to launch integration with bitbucket / jira, slack and MS Project. In addition, we understood the need to enter custom project templates. We are planning to work on all this, improving the overall usability of the service.
PS We invite everyone to take part in testing and share your opinion on Spekfy in the comments, in addition to this, you can ask any question to the developer - ebartashevich .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/326186/
All Articles