PM Network - October 2016

When the Dubai Interna- tional Airport decided to launch smartwatch apps to provide real-time travel information to passengers, time wasn’t on the project team’s side.

Netherlands mobile development firm M2mobi had just two and a half months to develop, test and release the app so it would be ready before the start of an airport tech conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The city’s airport wanted to be the first in the world to offer Apple Watch and Google Android-based watch apps compatible with its systems. To succeed, the project team had to familiarize itself with some unknown technical territory.

The DXB app provides travelers with airport maps, flight times, check-in locations, flight destinations and weather reports. The most essential information, about flights, needed to be shown on the smartwatch apps. With the clock ticking, the M2mobi team held weekly meetings with the client to avoid surprises that could derail the timeline—and to help tweak the project plan when problems arose, says Michiel Munneke, CEO of M2mobi, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The project’s cross-platform compatibility requirement pushed the team to develop additional expertise on the fly. Mr. Munneke’s team had experience developing apps for Apple Watch but not for Android, so it built an extra 25 percent into the project schedule. The team used that time to complete online tutorials, watch videos and research best practices to hone their Android knowledge and skills.

“These are never out-of-the-box projects,” Mr.

Munneke says.

One big challenge: Merging all of the data streams
into the airport’s back end proved to be more diffi-
cult than the team had anticipated. The team’s tech-
nical decision-making relied on researching good
practices. “There are a lot of analytics and statistical
libraries involved, and we had to be sure we made
the right choices,” Mr. Munneke says.

Ultimately, the Apple version was delivered on time, and the Android version was just a week late. The team learned a valuable lesson going forward for airport projects: Respect the complexity of the environment, including how data is shared, controlled and regulated. For instance, the team had external regulations, such as the sponsor’s guidelines about data streams, as well as internal requirements such as code reviews.

“If you don’t take the time to figure out how the airport works and how your technology will fit into it, you will set yourself up for failure,” he says. That means engaging the client early and often to understand its requirements and objectives as quickly as possible. “These relationships are built on trust, and the more trust you can build from the outset, the better it is for the project.”