Helium Spiral: A hybrid approach to project management, optimized for development of custom live event software.

Creating custom software for live events was a niche for Helium, the consulting company I co-founded. There are a variety of special considerations for custom live event software, such as software architecture, data acquisition, system monitoring and testing without having a real event (or possibly even real data). One unexpected area of innovation was project management: unlike with most products, there is a very clearly defined minimum set of requirements and absolutely no possibility of slipping the ship date: the live event will happen with or without you.

Helium established a precursor to Agile: we called it the Spiral. We started with a traditional waterfall approach, in order to scope the project and ensure that sufficient time and resources were allocated in order to have a working product on the day of the live event. However, once started, the project proceeded along a spiral: we established minimum functional milestones (akin to Agile’s user stories) and at each review we confirmed we were getting closer to our target and made adjustments as needed. If there was a major set-back we might not have all the desired functionality on race-day, but we made sure that the project development timeline was structured so that (a) the most challenging elements were tackled first, to minimize unknown risk, and (b) the center “rings” of the spiral were the “gravy” features.

From early on I figured out that everything we were trying to accomplish was either made easier or possible (or both!) by Julie’s incredible ability to understand what is important and what isn’t. She has an innate talent for scheduling, prioritizing and keeping things pointed in the right direction.
– Michael Gough, Chief Creative Officer, Quokka Sports

This approach was successfully used for numerous projects, including real-time delivery of results for sporting events produced by nbcolympics.com, golf.com, cart.com, and americascup.org.

Company: Helium
Position: Program Manager

References:
Helium website