I have been developing websites for a long time now and over the years I have seen a lot of changes in the way that we, as developers, approach projects. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that we not only approach projects differently but we also build them differently.
Personally, I wouldn’t have dreamed of using an open source content management system or framework about 7 or 8 years ago because a lot of these solutions weren’t mature enough to be trusted, especially from a security standpoint. Of course, this is polar opposite today, many popular content management solutions like WordPress, MODx, Joomla, and Drupal have all matured and are viable options for building web projects in.
While a whole lot has changed in terms of how we develop projects, one aspect of what we do hasn’t. Project Discovery, or the initial conversation you have with a prospective client prior to quoting out their web project, is extremely important. During this process I like to try to get my head around everything the client is wanting to achieve with their website.
Phase One:
This initial conversation, or Phase 1, usually consists of the following determinations…
- Do they require content management?
- Do they plan to blog or publish news releases?
- Do they need graphic design / photography / or page layouts?
- Do they have a rough project outline?
- Do they have content writers, or will we be quoting this out?
- Do they plan to capture any user data?
- Do they need any custom applications or functionality?
- Do they need to plugin or interact with any third-party applications?
- What is their timeframe for testing / launch?
- Do the also need email?
- What is their budget?
Phase Two:
Once I have all of the answers to Phase One I can pretty much start on a proposal, but before delivering the final cost analysis to the client I usually will follow up with them regarding our initial conversation about the following…
- Has anything changes since we last spoke about the project?
- Can we nail down the project outline and go through it to make sure we haven’t left anything out?
- If the project requires capturing data or any custom programming, can we nail down the specifics and build a model of how they are envisioning the project to function.
- If the project requires interacting with a third-party application or service, do we have a method for me to test this functionality? Is there support documentation or point of contact for this service?
- Who is going to be my point of contact during the project?
Once I have all of this information in my head, and I have already gone over our policies and procedures for dealing with scope creep and additional development costs down the road, I am usually ready to build them a proposal based on the information I have.
Since most of the discovery information I get from clients comes through either web conferencing or telephone calls, I simply jot down these notes in my notebook and pull from that while making the proposal. A few years ago I would send the prospective client my discovery notes along with my proposal just so that there wouldn’t ever be any confusion once the project got started. Over the years I have stopped doing this but I got to thinking today that it might not be a bad idea to start doing this again.
What Got Me to Thinking About This?
Today my business partners and I were on the phone w/ a potential new account and were asking him the usual discovery questions regarding his project. My partner Stephen had already spoken with this person briefly so he took the lead on the call, my partner Greg and I listened in and chimed in with any questions we might have. While this was going on, I jotted down a few notes in my notebook about the project, even though I had already more or less made the determination, as did my partners, that I was more than likely not going to be the one developing this project. Internally we are able to discern which one of us is best suited to manage a project, sometimes even from the initial conversation we are able to make this call…
When we got on the phone after the conference call with one another we all agreed that it would more than likely be a project that Greg would oversee. But, let’s say that Greg get’s bogged down and needs for me to pickup and help him out on a project, it would be nice for me to have access to the discovery notes that Greg has put together regarding the project. We currently use Basecamp for project management but it doesn’t do a detailed job of capturing discovery data in my opinion so I got to thinking what we could do to build onto this…
Idea for Custom Application
I am going to build a custom application that we can enter in discovery notes for projects into a form online during our conversation. I am also going to have this form be accessible by our blackberries and iphones as well. Of course, once all of the project discovery information is input we will be able to generate a PDF or Word Document from the data entered. I haven’t got the entire schematic worked out in my head as to what this is going to look like yet and I haven’t started on it, but once I have something rough, I will be sure to post an update here.
Just out of curiosity, what do you use for your project discovery process? Be sure to leave me your comments below…
Questions or Comments?