Over the years, we have gone through a process designed to create this plan. Some parts worked fine and some did not.
Our process is constantly evolving, but we want to reduce friction, risk, and cost by doing the right planning steps. And it turns out that the planning phase predicts the potential for success of the project more than any other phase of the project.
That is why we’ve dedicated a structured process for creating a plan:
Discovery.
The discovery phase is the first step in the project development process on the road to success. In this phase, we specify the purpose, value proposition, and expectations of the project.
Basically, discovery is all about learning what you have, what you want, and what you need holistically. The efforts here will ultimately help to make everyone happy. The purpose of the discovery phase is to manage time, energy and budget wisely, or atleast to know how to do it.
You’ll be actively working with your client or project stakeholder to obtain project requirements throughout this phase. The objective is to be as thorough as possible. However, don’t stop with the shareholders alone.
You should also speak with the project’s end users and whomever else may be involved. In order to prevent missing scope, you must acquire as much knowledge as possible at this step.
After you’ve acquired all of this data, it’s time to draught design and specification papers. You must record the task objectives as you understand them in this section. Once done, return to the consumer with these materials for him or her to evaluate.
Don’t worry if you need to iterate a few times until the requirements are finalized. This is beneficial since it ensures that everyone is on the same page. Therefore, make an effort to come up with a strong project definition.