Kick off the project with Scoping Session
The best way to start any product development or IT project is to be pragmatic. At Divante we like the Power Day workshops called “Scoping Session” and here is why.
Each successful IT project started one day, and among all the others, I can ensure You that the questions about the: timeline and budget had been asked.
To answer how much it will take and how costly the project is going to be developers and designers need to have some scope of work. Specification of what is to be done.
OK, some projects start with full Business Analysis processes that can take a long, long time. If your engagement isn’t like sending the rocket to the moon or governmental project You probably can go lean and agile.
Scoping session is designed to generate as much value and gather as much knowledge as we can within one or two business days.
From Divante side, there is a technical architect, UX designer, and product owner/project manager attending, and from the Client’s team usually, there are some business stakeholders, product owner and if the project is about the integrations — developers.
We try to create a kind of BRD (Business Requirements Document). It’s SCRUM-like User Stories list. We ask a lot of questions, draw a lot of mockups (low-fi — on paper) and do a lot of mind-maps to catch the idea and prepare the general design of the product.
As we’re quite often working with our products (Vue Storefront, Open Loyalty or Pimcore / Magento), we can even speed things up by basing on ready-made designs and live-demo.
For Vue Storefront we’ve prepared the Figma based design systems — which allows us to mock-up the UI, based on components in hours instead of days.
This is great! Your team can touch and test how the solution will look like. I can tell You — the most significant value from the Scoping Session is the understanding that both sides get off the project to be done.
After the workshops, we do prepare notes and package of all generated materials (mockups, mindmaps, spreadsheets, photos, etc.). Along with these outputs we try to mark up some ballpark estimation of the project budget and timeline. Sometimes we can create a kind of epic-based backlog that can be a starting point for the developers.
Sometimes, after Scoping Sessions both sides know that there is a need for more formal and deeper analysis work for some of the business processes. It’s not a problem, and typically this BA is done within first one or two sprints along with developers work.
Proof of Concept
The next step after Scoping Session is sometimes a Proof of Concept development phase. Sometimes Scoping is just a first part of PoC development.
Progressive Web Apps are hot. A lot of companies are thinking about it, and we did prepare a Vue Storefront product to address these needs.
OK, it’s free. Limited time offer :)
We’ll be more than happy to offer you FREE SCOPING SESSION workshops in our office (Wroclaw, 2h flight from London, 2h by car from Berlin). If You’re considering PWA for Your eCommerce, this is probably the best way to start without taking any significant risk.
Contact us: https://divante.co/contact-us
