Software
Discovery and
Scoping
Research by McKinsey and Oxford found a 45 percent average budget overrun in large IT projects. The Project Management Institute found that projects don't achieve their goals because of poor or inaccurate requirements, responsible for 47% of project failure. These studies cover larger project portfolios, not expected results for a Vu build.
Start with a discovery phase
Our solution: Do a Discovery phase.
Common scenario: You’ve written up a rough idea of what you want your new piece of software to do and sent it off to us and/or other developers to get a quote. We send back a ballpark figure, or several developers send back widely differing ballpark figures, and a rough idea of what we’re assuming it does.
Where the questions come from
Why the ballpark? Because it’s rare to be able to understand everything from the original brief. There are always going to be questions about what happens if X? What about Y? What sort of permissions will different types of user have? What happens if Z fails to provide that piece of information? How do we deal with conflicting information in A and B? And so on.
If it’s a complicated or unusual build, the best way to resolve those questions is to have a discovery phase where we talk to you and others involved to tease out what should happen.
Edge cases and who knows about them
Often the project sponsor may not know what happens when somebody cancels after depositing money into your online course, because it’s such a rare occurrence. But somebody does know, and it might be a team of people in operations who deal with the fallout.
If it’s an edge case, it’s good to tease these situations out at the start and ask those in charge of dealing with it how they’d like it to work, because it can involve decisions that are difficult to change later. For example, allowing cancellations after depositing money may mean we need to structure our database in a different way to prevent money being made or lost, which is easy to include from the outset and difficult to go back and change after we’ve built something else into it.
What a discovery phase involves
A discovery phase generally consists of four to six interviews with the people who would use your new software or whose job would be made easier by it. We want to talk to the people who deal with all the minutiae of paperwork and reconciliation, the people who’ve been doing this job long enough to know what happens when somebody tries to do something they shouldn’t be able to do, what happens when somebody leaves the company, what happens when somebody only pays half, etc. We’ll ask about plans for the future and the wider business goals for the project. We’ll find out who needs access to what, when information conflicts how to resolve it, what happens when an external system isn’t available. We’ll make sure we understand what’s included as well as what’s not, because knowing what a thing isn’t is just as important as knowing what it is.
We can also test assumptions about how good the data in a system is likely to be, whether an API will provide us with all the fields we need, whether somebody will tell us what’s going to happen before it happens or we’ll find out after the event, etc.
What you get at the end
By the end of the process we’ll have a specification of your piece of software that can be handed to any developer, whether ours or somebody else’s, with confidence that all the kinks have been ironed out. We’ll provide an estimate of costs and timings for each of the phases.
Discovery is a fixed fee which we agree before starting, based on how many different workflows there are and how many external systems need integrating. We’ll make recommendations about the technology to use and the team you’ll need. We’ll include options for next steps, whether that’s for us to build it, somebody else building it, or you might realise that you don’t need to build it after all. We’re happy to have uncovered a dud of an idea at the Discovery phase rather than after we’ve started building it. In those cases, we may be able to advise on ways to configure existing systems that you have to meet your needs. We’ll be upfront about any credit we can offer against our Discovery fee if you proceed with having Vu build it.
Get in touch
Book a scoping call.