Delivering best practice digital projects at Torpedo

It all starts with you.

All digital projects at Torpedo start with one thing – our fantastic customers.

We love having an engaged customer who integrates Torpedo as much as possible into their team. Having clear briefs and realistic timelines are a great foundation for the project.

Planning for success.

Before a digital project gets going, there are some important activities that, when done right, help the project and set expectations with all stakeholders.

• A project plan and roadmap – the cornerstone of planning a project. We use online tools to create our project plans using Smartsheet, Jira and Confluence.
• Clear project goals and objectives – the Discovery Phase of the project will ensure we capture and define these with you.
• Effective kick-off meetings – we have our own internal guidance at Torpedo to help ensure these cover the right topics and allow the project to start on the right foot.
• A project Futurespective or “Premortem” – for larger projects we may consider this activity. It allows the team to come together and explore aspects that may go wrong, and how we’d respond if they did. (Or how to prevent them in the first place!) In person, we may do this with post-it notes stuck on walls. Remotely, we may use a tool such as Miro.

We understand governance (and GDPR)!

Governance covers many areas but, overall, it helps the project to adhere to all the right functional, process and regulatory requirements.

• ISO27001 – Torpedo is accredited, so this means we create risk registers for each project as well as ensuring best practice.
• Documentation – our digital projects have standard documentation, ranging from specifications to definitions of sign off.
• GDPR and cookie consent – we’ll guide you through the requirements around this so that you can choose the right solution to ensure compliance.

UX and design.

Close integration between our UX team and Dev team is vital at Torpedo. Lots of communication between them throughout the project ensures the best possible results. Our in-house UX team have a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of techniques for discovering the right details, and making sure we get the design right for your project.

Development and testing.

• Tracking development in manageable chunks – Torpedo uses Jira as our project tracking tool as it’s great for software development, and delivers a great rounded toolkit with integrations for our developers and other teams. At the start of a project the right setup of a Jira board, and having the right backlog of tickets (whether agile or waterfall), allows the project to be delivered in manageable chunks, with the developer leaving comments to keep the team updated as we progress.
• Testing toolkit – we have a toolkit of testing options and approaches at Torpedo, and we’ll pick the best approach based on project complexity and budget. This can include:
  • Test Driven Development (TDD)
  • Automated testing (such as Selenium or Playwright)
  • Unit testing at a code level
  • User Acceptance Testing (UAT) manual test plans.

Keeping you and our teams in the loop.

Communication is key to a successful project. Within Torpedo we use a mix of techniques to keep everyone connected: standups, office days, and of course, Microsoft Teams! Best practice for communication on digital projects includes:

• Communication plan – at project kick-off we agree a communication plan, defining the frequency of keeping stakeholders updated. For larger projects, a RACI matrix may be considered to provide as much transparency as possible.
• Collaboration tools – it’s important each team has the right tools that work for them. At Torpedo we use Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Confluence, Jira and Miro.

A successful launch.

After all the hard work the digital project will be ready for launch. Careful planning is key and at Torpedo we have a set of internal processes to make this a success.

• Shared launch checklist – central to this is a shared launch checklist for all stakeholders. This is so everyone knows what is allocated to who, and to make progress visible to all.
• The date/time for launch – agree a date/time that works for all stakeholders, and we’ll help you navigate through the maze of DNS ownership and updates.

Learning and celebrating successes.

• Retrospectives – we’re a fan of the 4Ls approach but there are lots of other ways you can run a retrospective in a fun and imaginative way. Whether it’s remotely or in person, getting the team together to share experiences you can learn from for the future is very important.
• Improvement tracking – at Torpedo we feed our retrospective outcomes into a wider system so we can track improvements and keep learning ourselves.
• Celebrating successes – this is a great way to bring the team together at the end of the project. It can be done in many ways, whether it’s cakes in the office or going for lunch together. Torpedo also allows you to nominate colleagues for “Living the values” – another way to celebrate.

The end is the start.

The launch of the website is always just the beginning, not the end of the project. From this point, the website can evolve and deliver the KPIs you’ve set.

Through an on-going relationship with you, we can use analytics to find out how we can improve and develop new features.