A unique and original idea is not the key to success. According to statistics, almost half of the projects launched go beyond the originally planned budget. And a significant percentage of them are completely frozen or unfinished.
Why is this happening? The reasons may be different:
- the idea of the goals of the product and its place in the market was too vague;
- the development team misunderstood the customer's requirements;
- at the development stage, numerous changes were made, which took on a significant part of the budget and did not allow the project to be completed;
- the product turned out to be unclaimed by the user, etc.
All these problems could have been avoided if, even before the start of development, a clear action plan had been drawn up that would provide answers to all questions and help establish communication between all participants. It is possible to create such a plan when a discovery phase is included in the project.
What is discovery phase?
The discovery phase is the collection and analysis of data about the project, its commercial focus and target audience. This is exactly the key element of the development process, which allows you to create the right and clear sequence of actions and develop the initial idea of the customer most successfully. This stage takes relatively little time (usually from one week to a month, depending on the complexity of the project), but significantly reduces the time it takes for the product to be ready.
Discovery phase means:
- analysis of the client's request, his ideas, requirements and wishes regarding the future project - analysts should be able to correctly ask the customer questions and collect as much detailed information as possible to better understand the essence of the product;
- setting the goal of the project, forming a clear idea of the finished product for all development participants - the team will better understand the result to be achieved, and will also be able to offer alternative solutions that the customer might not have guessed;
- market research, analysis of competitors and users - user behavior models are created, the uniqueness of the product is studied;
- drawing up technical requirements for the product in a general document - usually it is provided in the specification format (the so-called SRS - software requirements specification), which takes into account all the suggestions and wishes of the customer;
- definition of a clear time and budget framework for the project - the final documents detail the costs and deadlines for each task within the development.
Who conducts research during the discovery phase?
One of the important roles in planning during the discovery phase is played by a business analyst, who can get an objective picture of the commercial environment of the product, its uniqueness in the market and competitiveness. He also studies the target audience and the end user, conducting special surveys or guided by existing research data.
Experts in various narrow areas, designers, cloud engineers, solution architects can be included in the work at the discovery phase.
Specialists also analyze the organization, immediately planning what functions will be performed by employees, and whether additional employees need to be hired to complete the remaining tasks.
The discovery phase sets the stage for the success of the project, as it creates all the necessary conditions for a productive development process:
1) Include the whole team in the process to explore the project from different angles and immediately make it clear to all participants.
2) Maintains constant communication so that all parties have a complete understanding of the project.
3) Studying the user as best as possible in order to make the product the most popular and successful.