Leading up to the customer pilot earlier this year, I was working a lot of hours for Omni and delivering updates on our internal version almost daily. This was due to a combination of the requested features before the deadline and making changes to our machine learning pipeline. As we approached the final week, I thought we were in a good place with the application, and I knew exactly what needed to be done in the final week of development. However, a last-minute meeting with the stakeholders changed my plans.
While the stakeholders have been updated on the app’s progress throughout the project, they had little interaction with the application. During this meeting they requested many changes to the user experience, identified new bugs and requested minor changes to the supervisor view of the application.
Reflecting on this now, I believe I could have prevented this by scheduling time to walk through the application with the stakeholders regularly and co-ordinating a requirements document with them early on in the planning stage to ensure we understood what was to be delivered. Due to this experience, at Omni, we are now following a “Test Early, Test Often” mantra, where we install the application on our phones and run internal pilots frequently to identify issues earlier. We have also established showcases for our stakeholders that walk through individual features of the application.