When we say the first phase goes live within four to eight weeks, the first question we hear is how that's possible. Here is the breakdown of one project — a retail chain with nine branches — week by week.
The first two weeks are interviews and mapping. We sat with the chain manager, two branch managers, the finance manager and the person who runs the warehouse. We didn't ask them to describe the procedure but to open their screens and show us what they actually do. That's where it emerged that special orders were handled in a WhatsApp group, which didn't appear in any document.
Week three is planning and decisions. We presented the current picture and a phased plan, and the client had to decide three questions: who owns customer data, what counts as a closed order, and what happens when a branch sells an item that's out of stock in the warehouse. Every delay in these decisions is a direct delay to the timeline — and it's the only part of the project outside our control.
Weeks four to six are the build. We set up the system, matched the screens to the names the team actually uses, and migrated the data from the spreadsheets with duplicates cleaned up. At the same time we ran the new system alongside the old method, so any gap would surface in time and not after the switchover.
Week seven is testing and training. We tested edge cases — what happens when an order is cancelled after inventory has already been deducted, and what happens when a branch works without internet. Branch managers got a one-hour training session and a short document covering the five processes that change in their day-to-day work.
Week eight is go-live and support. We didn't switch off the old method on the same day; we kept it open read-only for another two weeks. What we'd do differently: bring the three decisions forward to week one instead of week three. They didn't need the full mapping, and they were what held everything up.
The bottom line
A project's timeline depends less on development speed and more on how fast the organization makes three or four hard decisions.