At Springbox, we are witnessing an evolution in the types of projects we produce for clients. Instead of a microsite, banner ads or an email campaign — mainstays of interactive marketing — some of our clients seek our expertise in developing software-based products and services.
To date, the agency has developed complex applications such as the Michael J. Fox Foundation's Clinical Trial Finder and we're working on a fully customizable content management and marketing solution for another client, to name a few.
It's an ongoing learning process, and, we've learned, which should come as no surprise, that software development processes are quite different from interactive marketing processes. So what do you do when you move from the promotion of products and features to, well, actually creating the products and features themselves? I don't pretend to have all of the answers, but here are some trends I've noticed.
Different Goals, Different Processes
Like many agencies, most of our processes and workflow are linear — each phase in workflow is a prerequisite for the subsequent step. Discovery leads to strategy to design to development (and so on and so forth). Product and software development is different. More exploratory. More iterative. More complex. Progress often sheds new light on a problem, and initial approaches are abandoned. In terms of scheduling, this can create problems. How do you plan for the unforeseen? Many of the processes relied on by agencies, while intended to promote progress, can lead to divisions within an agency and in-between clients and agency (one client/agency/team has its assigned action items, another a different set). How agencies address the challenges created by divisions is key.
Design Strategy
Creative agencies, not surprisingly, often place a premium on time and energy spent in the creative phase, with strategy and production oftentimes taking a back seat. In terms of interactive marketing projects such as a microsite or a simple app, a strategy and content document, some wireframes, a design direction and basic functional descriptions are usually sufficient. But when it comes to more complex software development, the client's business objectives and the agency's strategies and outputs can be quite different (and often there's more of them).
Documentation
Documentation, as always, is essential, but even more so with projects that have a wider scope. In collaborating with clients on developing software and/or products there is more back and forth as compared to a website project. The product being produced has a direct impact on the clients' business and it's being built from the ground up. Changes and revisions are bound to happen. Better to have thorough documentation in place.
The People Factor
It takes the right kind of people to tackle product or software development projects. It's learn-as-you-go process. A cross-disciplinary team is preferable and, quite possibly, a necessity. Our agency has begun to discuss the benefits of agile development, and we're looking for projects where we can test-drive that approach.
So what have you noticed? Which trends in software development can benefit agencies? What will an agency look like in the future, and what kinds of projects might it be working on?