Everyone loves to spend a portion of their time documenting their ideas, work, issues, concerns, processes, approaches, estimates, research, history, and whatever else we can transcribe from life to paper. I know it’s my favorite thing – when I finish a project up, proud of my accomplishments, I wanna relive it all on paper as soon as possible.
WHAT?? You can see right through my paragraph o’ sarcasm? Well, yeah maybe I exaggerated a little. Truth is, documenting information about a project allows us to see patterns that we can’t possibly pick up on while we’re neck deep in the mire of production on a web project.
Documentation for a web project here at Worthwhile starts with the conception of a project – the initial meeting with someone about their idea and their aspirations of making the internet an integral part of that idea’s success. This generally culminates into two types of documentation – some that describe the project goals with as much detail as possible, and some that describe the project production and how it all will be executed. In my experience managing projects, this documentation is key in meeting goals and achieving success.
So what goes into this documentation? Well, as I mentioned earlier, it all starts with the initial meeting, the ‘Discovery Phase’. Here, the fundamental constraints and goals are defined. What is the idea, who is it targeted towards, how will it benefit the target as well as the idea owner? Once these things are defined, you can determine what functions and tools are needed to achieve these goals. A website or web application cannot be successful unless you clearly know what ‘successful’ is. Another huge aspect to defining success is the constraints of the project – what hurdles are in the way of that final goal?
There are three major players here: Quality, Time, and Budget.
- Time is relatively easy to understand – when does it need to be finished, plain and simple.
- Budget is also pretty straight forward, how far can we get with the money available for the project?
- Quality is a little harder to pin down, because it relies on the other two constraints to make it real – what can be done within the allotted time frame, within the allotted budget, to meet as many of the initial goals as possible?
If your initial goals are clear, and your time and budget are understood, you’re on your way to success.
The care and passion we put into our work here at Worthwhile is what separates us from the pack as far as successful web application design and deployment. We love the discovery phase of a project, because that’s where we can apply our real talents to create a genuine success. Business Goals, Information architecture, Functional specifications, Elemental wireframes, Savvy design, and Skilled execution – these are the ingredients of internet success.
Bake at 350 for 40 minutes. Serves 6.8 billion.
