Programme Delivery
The process
Inception
Project Inception is a preliminary phase to explore the project objectives, highlight problems and opportunities, identify the scope, define benefits to be gained upon successful completion, estimate time required to do the project, and request for funds necessary for project execution.
Discovery
Project Discovery stage entails further deep analysis to understand the AS IS process including pain points, the TO BE model including new opportunities, and from that identifying the high level business requirements and solution. Requirements are prioritized and further phased out to define MVP and beyond.
Design
Project Design phase involves detailed exploration and analysis of each business requirement. In this phase, the low level functional and technical requirements are defined and documented and passed on to the delivery team for development in an iterative fashion.
Inception
The purpose of this phase is to define the high-level needs and features of the project, why these needs exist, and what their benefit is. The details of how the project fulfills these needs are captured later. Using this analysis we can form a detailed and shared understanding of the projects scope and goals before proceeding.
Output:
Epic hypothesis
Business Vision document
A call to go over this document and obtain sign off before we proceed
Discovery
The purpose of this phase is to further refine and define the high-level needs of the project, why these needs exist, and what their benefit is. In addition, we set out the features of the project, how we will order them into iterations and how we will measure their benefit. Using this analysis we can form a more detailed shared understanding of the project's scope and goals before proceeding.
Output:
Business Requirements Document
A call to go over this document and obtain sign off before we proceed
Design
The design phase is about getting the detail of the project. This will involve the BA team producing a set of stories and acceptance criteria giving a detailed description of the project's deliverables and test scenarios. It is this that the development team should consider the single source of truth to be developed and tested against. Discovery continues throughout the design phase so that each iteration can use the learning from any previous iterations to improve.
Output:
A set of stories in Azure DevOps
An internal meeting to refine the stories with the development team that will deliver the project
Demo calls per iteration to get feedback on what has been achieved
How many days effort does it normally take?
The length of time needed is going to be very project specific. As a rough rule of thumb you can expect the analysis to take about as long as the development. What we are able to do is to give a rough estimate on how long discovery will take at the start of the project, and then once discovery is complete a rough estimate on how long each feature will take to analyse.