Look before you leap: How a web project fitness check can save you money

Note: this is part one of a mulitpart series showing how you can make your web project go smoothly (and save you money in the process).

You have a great idea for a web application? It's big and ballsy? And does this, that, and the other? Super. We're all ears. Now, tell us about your budget...

Ok, let's be honest: your eyes are bigger than your belly. You have champagne taste, but a lemonade budget. It turns out that you want more than you can afford. We applaud your dreams, but websites and web applications cost money to develop. Really, they do.

If the above is the case (you want to build the next Facebook but don't have a budget), discussions about what your product needs to deliver – and in turn what you want your development partner to deliver – can become an exercise in planned disappointment. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way! One simple and relatively cheap thing you can do is put your idea through a few fitness tests before any major budget has been approved.

People are used to having ‘Go, No-go’ meetings during projects, how about one at the start?

The beginning of life

In my humble opinion, every project should start life with a discovery – or viability – meeting. Involving subject experts, decision makers, target users and a software development company, the meeting would create a list – backlog, we call them – of features, which, unlike any list created in isolation, would have the massive benefit of having been discussed by the relevant people before large amounts of money are set-aside. You get to discuss your project with very knowledgable people and work through issues that might arise and be very costly during development.

Other benefits of a discovery process

Two other benefits, from this process:

• The backlog produced would be prioritised illustrating what’s essential for a viable product and what’s ‘nice to have’.

• The backlog would also be estimated so that a more accurate estimate of effort, and therefore cost/time, could be used to decide whether the budget is available and highlight the total cost of ownership.

Think of this as quantity surveying for software projects!

Your next steps

Armed with this detailed information, and having only spent a fraction of the budget, gaining agreement for go-ahead will also be much easier.

Once the project begins, all this work is still 100% relevant. Normally a large discovery activity would come prior to commencement proper, but with this work already complete, the project would merely verify the backlog, whether it’s ordered correctly, and allow you to begin the development process much sooner.

The cost of failure is great; what if the cost of success could cost as little as talking to Annertech.