Is this development process ok?

In My Humble Opinion
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Hey guys,

I’ve been asked, with the help of the lead developer on my team, to come up with a basic web/software development process for us to use (modified sometimes based on the project). Does this seem like a good start?

Planning:

Project Manager meets with Product Owner to review contact, confirm business needs, timeline, budget, etc.

Entire team reviews contract, comes up with questions for product owner/client, and relays them to the Project Manager.

Once questions are answered, the Project Manager states project assumptions (e.g. the contact forms must be very user friendly, given the older demographic, etc).

The client confirms these assumptions

The lead Developer and Creative Director respond to the confirmed assumptions (goals) with more detailed requirements (e.g. the contact forms will include a datepicker, fields for name, address, phone, etc).

The project manager adds to these requirements the milestones, timeline, etc.

The team and client confirm this final document

The team (Lead Developer, Creative Director, and PM) split work into independent pieces, associate timeline and budget to them based on milestones, and assigns a team member of either the creative or development team.

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anyone?

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Sometimes the client is asking for more than they can afford (either monetarily or timewise, or both). But if you’re already four months into the project when you discover that, generally the solution is to push the deadline and charge more money and so on and end up either dragging th time and money out of the client (that they couldn’t afford) or the client eventually canceling it. In either case, there’s bad feelings on both sides and the project sucked for all involved.

Personal recommendation would be that you say that you need anywhere from three days to a week, during which time you’ll have your PM, lead dev, designer, and maybe an artist all there. You spend 1 to 3 hours each day pulling out what the client is thinking of, work up stick figure mockups in the evening, bring those back the next day, spend another 1 to 3 hours going over them, do more mockups, etc. Once that’s done, the lead dev tells you how much time it would take to create minimum, you double that value, and present it to the client.

LOOP:

If they accept that the time is worth it, then you move on to figuring out a few milestones (3 or 4, that become closer as time advances) during which they can see the project and make some changes. goto END

If they don’t accept that the time is worth it, you start figuring out which parts of the project can be cut to meet their time requirements. Do a new set of mockups and present it all again. goto LOOP

END:

Changes will still happen as the project goes on, but unless you’ve got everything 90% designed within the first or second meeting with the designer and the lead dev in the room, and both of them having permission to give un-vetoable timelines, you’re just blowing air and wasting time.

You’re better to spend a week wasting everyone’s time, than discover later that you’ve wasted a year of everyone’s time.

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You might also read my little op-ed piece.