Posted in Consulting, Digital Commerce, Digital Transformation, Experience Design, Software & Development
July 16, 2024
DISCOVERY & STRATEGY OVERVIEW
Project Planning at Acro Commerce
Anders Paulsen, Director of User Experience, gives us an overview of our planning process at Acro Commerce. Uncovering detailed information about your company, its goals, objectives, and overall desires for your development project helps us build a better plan for project success. Dive in as Anders gives us an overview of what project planning entails.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Anders Paulsen, Director of User Experience at Acro Commerce.
In the following series, I’d like to walk you through the Project Planning phase here at Acro, which you may hear our team commonly refer to as a “Discovery & Strategy.”
Our team starts each new project by working to uncover information.
We’ll dig into your current website’s architecture with exercises like a
- Content Inventory,
- Analytics Review,
- and Technical Audit
We’ll also ask a wide range of questions during Discovery Sessions to better understand your business goals and motivations, target audience, and website users' overall needs.
As we uncover the necessary information, we’ll work toward establishing a well-informed plan for developing and delivering your project.
At this time, we’ll work through various deliverables, such as…
- an Information Architecture, including User Personas and a Sitemap Diagram,
- and Technical Architecture, covering recommendations for Commerce and CMS solutions, as well as Modules, Integrations, and Hosting Architecture.
In this phase, we’ll often also start by sharing a basic Prototype, to provide a visual reference for how we recommend developing a first iteration of your site build that meets project requirements.
Of course, the goal following Discovery & Strategy is to move into Development.
After all, this is where everything comes together — where you’ll begin to see real, working code on which we can iteratively develop site features and review the experience that you’ll eventually share with your customers.
But there’s actually still an interim step — the real outcome of our planning phase, which helps to prepare our team for completing your project most efficiently — the Project Backlog.
This comes in the form of an Ordered List of project tickets outlining requirements for the upcoming Design and Development of your site.
Tickets are set up in a structure known as
- Stories, which are grouped into
- Epics, and broken down as
- Tasks
… but we’ll get into backlog structure more in an upcoming video.
For now, what’s important to know is that these backlog tickets represent the scope of work planned for your project.
Following the Scrum framework, development is broken up into timeboxed increments known as Sprints, and a selection of tickets is scheduled for each sprint.
This approach helps to keep our projects on track, with clear expectations for what we can expect to review and deliver at the end of each Sprint, leading all the way up to site launch.
In the following series, we’ll look more closely at some of the Discovery exercises our teams use to determine project requirements and some of the common Strategy deliverables you can expect to see along the way…
Thanks for listening.
Up Next, Discovery.
Precision planning leads to better projects.
Learn more about our Discovery & Strategy process by reaching out to our team today.