1. Strategic objectives
Websites need to evolve with the organisation’s objectives as well as their adminsitrative capability, otherwise, they are not effective as tools that support your objectives.
Therefore, it is important for the project team to have the same understanding of the organisation’s goals over a horizon in terms of:
a. Resourcing and skills
b. Key projects and developments across the business
c. Finance and budgets
d. Program development
e. Organisational objectives
Typically, we run several workshops with different combinations of members from teams as there will be many shared functions and process, as well as differnt skill levels to accomodate and design for.
2. Policies and governance
Projects often encompass many busines processes such as e-commerce, communications and marketing, operations and customer service, so it is critical to understand the process and policies behind each process to understand the impact a new solution will have. This will also determine the level and nature of ongoing support required once the project has been handed over.
This stage includes the following steps:
- Workshops
- Outline workflows
- Highlight gaps and resources
- Roles and responsibilities
3. Solution Design
This stage can be quite broad – as there are many possible contributors to a project from different third parties. Often, a deep understanding will need to be developed in the following:
- Hosting Infrastructure
- System administration with an ERP
- Security compliance (will be expanded on from policies and governance)
- Content creation and updates (including brand requirements and UX development)
- E-commerce process – reconcilliation, records and paytment gateways
- Reporting and insights
4. Risk managemnt
Every project contains an element of risk, which we define as unknown variables that can have a detrimental effect on the project outcome, budget or timline. A session where we try to anticpate the risks, document and suggest contingency is a valuable process to managing the unexpected.
At the conclusion of each stage, documents will be created to record decisions and define the project deliverables, timelines and budget.