Project Discovery Workshops

When you’re beginning a new digital project or reworking an existing one, you want the product to be tailored to your exact requirements by the Outsourcify team. Whatever the circumstances, you want the project to succeed and the product to achieve its goals.

How would you be certain of this outcome? Project discovery is the solution.

We usually start every project with consulting to analyze our clients needs, we call this phase Project Discovery, it consists of interactive meetings between our client’s projects stakeholders and the Outsourcify team, and then we do our homework to come up with a digital project sitemap, and structure of each page/screen, before getting into the design. We work with a visual first approach, meaning we first create wireframes of all screens from the conclusions of the UX (User Experience) study, after discussions and our client’s approval, and we then move on to the UI (User Interface) design of each page. You can eventually expect your website to look exactly like the design you approved.

Business Analysis
We examine the requirements, customers, and functionality, documenting them in requirement specification documents,
Gathering information and elements
We analyze all elements you already prepared in order to get the full picture,
Project Plan
We define the scope of the project in phases and task lists, propose an appropriate architecture and technologies, and select the best experts in our team to implement them.

Why is Project Discovery often neglected?

Clients might have a variety of reasons to think a Project Discovery phase is not needed, most likely because they consider that their project is already well-defined and doesn’t require additional thought. Often it’s actually because there’s a tight deadline, other times there’s a limited budget, and some people believe that project exploration is a luxury consulting service that shouldn’t be performed on every project.

The reality is that Project Discovery is never a waste of time, the extra consulting Outsourcify offers in the beginning of each project always has a positive impact on the output in terms of design and development of the project. Sometimes workshops are anyway needed because the elements provided by our clients are not sufficient for our teams to start working on the design or development.

Understand business requirements

At the beginning of an initiative, it’s particularly important for our team to understand exactly your business requirements.

The main goal of this workshop is to learn as much as possible about our clients’ businesses, objectives, users and competitors through the interviews with the clients. Clients know what they want for both the market and users. It helps us to make it easier to understand the needs and find effective solutions and suggestions to improve the user experience.

Gather existing elements from the team

Knowledge about the project objectives is mandatory but our teams also need to collect any document that could be helpful to the project from its stakeholders, it could be corporate identities, examples of what competitors do, previous designs, existing products.

Create consensus on plans and priorities for a project

Now is the time to define the exact scope of the project and divide it in phases. Do you need a MVP (minimum viable product) first with just the features to be usable by your first customers? Do you need to plan your project in successive phases to match a marketing plan?
Once all tasks have been listed, it is important to regroup them in coherent phases to organize the project design and development.

Choosing the right tools

Architecture and technologies

Once we know what you want to develop, it’s time to figure out the appropriate technical architecture and the technologies that are adapted to the project. Programming languages aren’t the most important – PHP, Python or Javascript can be used for the same purposes -, the main technology choices often concern more the pertinence of using preexisting libraries over custom development.

Processes and communication

Another very important part of a project is to agree between all stakeholders on processes to define tasks, quality and validation, and eventually on the tools that will be used to communicate and coordinate the project.