Would you agree to begin construction of a new home or commercial building without a blueprint and details set of plans?  Of course not.  Likewise, clear and specific requirements documentation is critical to delivery of systems and sites that meet expectations with respect to scope, functionality, visual design, security, timelines and, of course, cost.  Both business users and technologists all too often do not possess the writing skills necessary to articulate these elements in a way that is sufficiently specific to allow preparation of cost and time estimates, with the result that development groups, either internal or external, find it necessary to pad their estimates to allow for unknowns.  These users also are frequently too close to the business processes in question to be able to describe their expectations without stating assumptions that may seem obvious to them, but will not to project participants who are not involved in the day-to-day operation of the business or the details of communication and transactional requirements a business website needs to fulfill.

Before beginning any project we strongly recommend a Requirements Discovery, Documentation and Planning (RDDP) phase, usually conducted as a brief "mini-project" to be conducted and completed before site development begins (for those familiar with the Rational Unified Process, or "RUP", this corresponds to its inception and elaboration phases).  RDDP typically consists of one or more discovery and design meetings to discover your requirements and expectations in detail, followed by our documentation of information collected at these sessions, which are in turn followed by your review and feedback.  At the end of the phase we deliver a final requirements document and project plan that includes an agreed upon scope of the development and deployment phases and a solid estimate of the time and anticipated costs for executing them.

A key advantage of performing the RDDP phase as a separate subproject that wraps up before main development is that it significantly reduces the risk of project costs overruns and helps avoid potential failure by ensuring that we jointly understand your requirements and their implications at the beginning of the project.

Clients at first sometimes suspect that performing something like an RDDP before the "main" portion of the project creates an additional layer of costs.  In fact, the opposite is true.  The activities we jointly perform during RDDP are ones which would (or should) occur over the course of the project if not performed at its outset as we recommend.  Our RDDP approach, by contrast, minimizes misunderstandings (and resulting increases in time and costs) between client and developer that occur later in the project, as well as "gotchas" that arise as a result of unanticipated technology development or implementation complexities.

For further details on RDDP and its relationship to overall project execution, see the article entitled How We Work: Our Methodology.

Please contact us today to learn how we can provide you with the quality, cost effective solution you want.