Innovation

At AndPlus, we have businesses of all types and sizes come to us to discuss how to bring their brilliant digital concept to life. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the workforce, the time, or even all of your ideas ready to present. We’re here to help you scope out the project in any stage of development and can ensure a successful launch. This starts with developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). To do this, we’ll detail the entire scope of the project through a solution blueprint, making sure we leave no subject uncovered and understand your goals completely. We also focus on determining the project’s value in the market, and discussing the concept as a whole before working on our project blueprints. 

Here’s an example of exactly how we break down an Innovation project:

The Chuck team approached AndPlus with a proposal for a social media mobile application for sports fans. Chuck was a great idea, but one with high-level concepts that needed lots of research and details before starting the building process. At its core, end users could create an account, choose their favorite teams, and interact with other users similar to other social apps by creating posts, liking, commenting, and direct messaging. End users could view information and news on players, teams, scores, games, and more. In order to gather deeper user requirements and understand what third-party plugins we needed to incorporate, our team proposed to start with a Product Map. 

We knew that our project with Chuck needed to focus on user experience, so we researched competitors as well as a small group of potential beta users in order to understand the market and find out where other apps were missing the mark. Initial user journeys illustrated how users would navigate through the different screens of the application. From there, we created more in-depth wireframes for the app’s key interactions and how those interactions would be supported in the User Interface.

User Experience is one of the most important design assets you can add to your software. No matter how efficient or useful your app is, its community of end users will determine its value. If you want to learn how to make your design more user friendly, we’d love to hear from you.

With the wireframes completed and a deeper understanding of the functions of the application, our technical team began to dig into the architecture that would support its functionality. Time to market was a key driver for stakeholders, so we built a cross-platform architecture with Ionic, rather than two separate builds for Android and iOS. We could use Ionic and front end technologies like React to quickly build the first release of the application. These frameworks are doubly helpful, as they can also be used to build web applications in the future.

Our technical team also completed a series of “spikes,” or focused mini-projects where we dive deep into areas of potential risk and complexity. For Chuck, we looked at the functions of the app that would matter most to the user: two-way and group chat platforms, team and player data, and live game feeds. These spikes were crucial to figure out third-party data retrieval, complex data storage, and integrations for social media interactions. 

When we were confident we had extensively researched everything regarding user experience and technical information, our team was able to schedule an MVP release that we could roll out in an efficient 3-5 months, and a 1.1 release that built upon the MVP foundation. This release plan was completely dialed in: it outlined the scope, timeline, team size and budget of the project, so there would be no surprise costs or timeline delays. 

Enhancement

Many companies have successful software or products but could benefit from updates or improvements, and aren’t sure which road to take to implement these updates. There are so many great programs that just need a boost in user experience development to increase performance. Ask us for a consultation and we’ll find ways to upgrade and refine how your product is viewed and used by your customers. We offer expert advice in UX enhancement, cloud storage options, and other sales-boosting solutions.

While enhancement isn’t a full overhaul or redesign, implementing enhancements take just as much thought and expertise. Sometimes an enhancement requires replacing legacy code, meaning code that’s no longer supported. In this case, the scope of the project is decided based on the type of sprints taking place. Sometimes, old software can be used in conjunction with new code, depending on type. However, the easiest way to avoid future problems is to start over (change that). AndPlus’ experts make updating code easier. Even making small adjustments to your site or app can have huge impacts. During an initial Product Map consultation, we help you decide the best route to take for your project. 

Here’s an example of what Enhancement Product Map can do:

National Lumber initially approached AndPlus with a handful of bug fixes and enhancements they wanted to make to their sales dashboard. We found out quickly that this decade-old software would reap long-term benefits from more significant updates and modernization. 

In this scenario, since we already had a functional framework for their software, we used a variation of our product map called an Enhancement Product Map. During an Enhancement Product Map, we take an analytical and diagnostic approach so we can build from within. First, we learn every detail about how the application works: how the code works, how it’s hosted, and how deployments work in its current state. We also learn how users interact with the application: what inputs they enter and outputs they expect. From there, we plan the release of new enhancements and build them within the current application without disrupting the current software. 

National lumber had technical debt that needed mitigation, as well as new infrastructure to support the software’s future. We first read the code manually, and then scanned the code with Sonar, a Java-based software quality checker. During our initial assessment, our team manually read the code to get an understanding of how the business logic was implemented, and also ran the code base through Sonar, an automated quality control checker. Sonar picked up on some improvements, but a manual review noticed many areas where business logic and front end code were intermingled, which can lead to code breakage. Additionally, we also interviewed National Lumber’s IT team and uncovered error-prone code deployment. To remedy this, we suggested building out a Continuous Integration/Continuous Discovery pipeline, testing different environments for development, and Staging/QA and production. We tackled this all in our first development sprint to ensure that our team had a smooth and less risky dev, testing, and deployment process. 

The next step was writing user requirements, with a focus on how they would fit into the software’s current information architecture. We workshopped multiple wireframes to find the process that best met National Lumber’s business requirements. From there, we broke the wireframes out into user stories and development tasks. Over the next 16 months, we rolled out four incremental releases and improvements, prioritizing functionality for salespeople and their production teams. 

Implementation

Implementation Product Maps are typically chosen when the scope of the project is predetermined. Normally this occurs when a client approaches AndPlus with their project scoped out deeply and requirements are really clear. Our team goes through this process in order to absorb the information our customer comes to us with and create a plan for development and releases. 

Here’s an example of what Implementation looks like:

Onset’s data warehousing was costing too much. They knew a shift to Snowflake from Redshift would solve the problem, but they didn’t have the in-house resources with the experience to make such a large shift. 

We understood the business value of the proposition, and had the tools to accomplish Onset’s vision. Our team started out with a short Implementation Product Map.

With AndPlus’s inherent knowledge of Onset’s systems, our goal in this Implementation Product Map was to detail the current data, plan the applications that push and pull data from redshift, and create an implementation plan to handle the new shift to Snowflake. 

The main goal of this project was to move data from Redshift to Snowflake in a long series of short segments. We do this in small batches and extend the process over time so there's no service interruption, and the team that relies on this data can use it throughout the entirety of our software maintenance. Onset and AndPlus have become longtime partners, successfully collaborating together for several years. 

The AndPlus Agile+ Product Map methodology has a decade-plus track record in successful digital transformations. Whether it’s Innovation, Enhancement, Implementation, or a combination, these are dependable processes that increase value, reduce risk, and promise long-lasting improvements. That’s why every stage of the development process takes place under one roof, in our Boston-based facility. No offshore or contract development teams - ever. If you want to work with our team of experts, we would love to hear from you.